I saw her, for the first and only time, on a rainy November afternoon in 1962. We both boarded the Fifth Avenue bus, going downtown, at Forty-second Street. We both found seats at the back of the bus, and she sat across the aisle from me.

She wore glasses, had straight, long, mousey brown hair, an armful of books, an alpaca-lined raincoat, and a sad, small face. She was ugly and she knew it.

I imagined that she was the only child of an intellectual couple no longer married to each other. Her mother had a full-time job and would not be home until six. At least two evenings a week the mother took courses toward her master's, maybe once a week she went out with a man. Her father was a writer addicted to collecting, and adding to, obscure reference books. When she was little, before her parents were divorced, she was the center of their world. Now she was very much alone. Her intelligence made her a displaced person. It isolated her from other children and, even more, from adults…. Among her schoolbooks were two library books with their spines away from me, but with the stamp of the New York Public Library system on the accordion of pages. They were too thick to be children's books. (p. 142)

I stared at the girl until she looked at me, wrinkled her nose, and turned her head away. With that visual dismissal I suddenly knew that what I really wanted to do with my life was to write the kind of books she would like. Not adult books, which she read even now, but books for her—for her age, for her needs, for her intelligence.

This special girl, unlike the others, would not grow older. For me she would always be twelve, her mind fifteen. She would never be part of my world, and I would never be part of hers. The only thing that I could hope for was to build a bridge for her, a bridge of books. Not from her world into mine, but from her childhood into her adulthood. If I could only do that, she need never jump, for the jump from one world to the other is a long and dangerous one—and I did not want this child to fall.

That evening I began to rewrite Shadow of a Bull. I had recently finished it as a short story, and already it had been rejected by a magazine. I decided to use the story I wrote for adults as an outline of a children's book. Not any children's book. It was to be her book. As I converted thirteen pages into fourteen chapters, I was worried about the unlucky publisher who might publish this book intended for an audience of one.

When the book did come out, I began to wait for a letter from the kid on the bus. (pp. 142-43)

I still have not heard from my girl. Maybe one day she will write; maybe she won't. Whether she does or doesn't. I have already written an answer to her: (p. 143)

Shadow was mostly about pride and being locked in. I say pride rather than self-respect, because in Spain the word pride encompasses so much—honor and dignity and self-esteem. You'll find that sort of pride in others, more often in the poor than in the rich, and you'll find it in yourself. Because you are you, you'll respect it wherever you find it in spite of what others may say about it. That sort of pride, sometimes—most of the...